The girl I love, tried to rape me.

*TRIGGER WARNING: Attempted Rape*

A long distance relationship means many things for those involved. For months, it meant talking everyday for hours on end, getting to know one another through an iPhone screen isolated from the rest of the universe. We told each other about our families, day-to-day-lives, histories, and I even shared my story of being raped at a party five years prior, to which she was horrified and also seemingly the most understanding.

After accumulating hundreds of hours of conversation, I fell in love with a girl I met on vacation thousands of miles away. It was perfectly idealistic in that Drew Barrymore romantic-comedy sort of way, and the vision I had of her was that of my future.

I was prepared to pack my bags and move to another continent because my love, my first love, was so astronomically blinding that nothing she ever said seemed anything other than perfect and rational. And so it only make sense to book her ticket to visit; finally after almost a year since meeting first. I paid for the ticket because she had some money troubles at the time. I paid (never to be repaid) over $1000 to fly my abuser to my home.

Things were rocky immediately when she arrived, but my rosy vision shoved all of that aside. The third day of her trip, we decided to go out on the town. To my knowledge, I understood she was generally a heavy drinker, but the magnitude to which she got drunk that night was startling. After an hour of convincing her that we needed to get home, she got in the car and we made our way to my house. Completely frustrated and frankly slightly disgusted with her level of intoxication, I got into bed, turned off my light, and turned away from her so I could sleep away how I felt, silently hoping that it was all some type of fluke.

Suddenly, I felt her climb into bed and put her arm around me... which made me uneasy but I could handle it. As she started to try and kiss me, I didn't budge from my locked away body position. What happened next is still a muddied memory... but I can remember her hands trying to reach around and try to touch me. As I turned further around, she pulled me with all of her strength (which was immense, as she was a trained police officer of 6 feet and 200 lbs). I can remember her grabbing me, touching me places that I was trying to turn away, and yelling at me as if I was denying her starving body a meal.

Once she could physically feel that not only was I not aroused, I was completely combative, her drunken mind finally gave up in anger; she turned away, called me some form of bitch, and dozed off. I was left there, alone in my confusion and disgust as to what the girl I loved had just tried to do, and tears silently poured down my face as violation set in.

Every possibility of what I would do next flooded into me, but it was as if I was paralyzed by the idea of what I hoped was love. The next day, she woke up with a radical hangover and demanded that I make her breakfast. Although I do not remember the exact moment when, I did end up telling her what occurred and how terrifying it was, especially considering the experience I shared with her about my fate at the hands of a drunken man.

She was so outraged, not at herself, but at me, for even suggesting that she could possibly be the monster I was eluding she might be. At 25 years old, never having had been in such a serious relationship, I dismissed the entire thing and was even angry at myself for the thoughts I was developing around the situation. With the amount of strength that love holds, I had the power to redesign the circumstances of that night into something else; so much so that I didn't even need to forgive her, I was simply wrong and misunderstood her intentions.

After all, isn't that so much easier than muttering the words "the girl I love tried to rape me." We went on with the rest of her visit, and by the end I was so completely re-entangled in her charm that everything else just seemed like a distant nightmare.

Eventually she left, and several months later we broke up during my visit to her. Ironically, we had a mutually agreeable discussion about us not being right for one another, and at the time I still didn't see how consistently abusive and controlling she was, and my main fault was sometimes talking back or standing up for myself.

About a year and a half after our break up, when I was able to understand what and who she truly was, she called me begging to give things another try. It was then that I finally had the courage, no longer blinded by love, to tell her how horrible she was to me and that I could never see myself back in her clutches. The anger it took to say things I bottled up through the entirety of our relationship was one of the most freeing feelings on earth.

To say it didn't change the course of my love life would be a lie. The next person I dated was such a pendulum swing in the other direction, that I was miserable for opposite reasons. I still feel the fire of anger about how much I'm affected, how I have to tell people such an embarrassing thing about myself and what type of abuse I was willing to endure.

But simultaneously, I empowered in knowing that if I had the willpower once because of love for someone else to transform my mind and my feelings in such unimaginable ways, that means I have the same strength to do so in positive and healthy ways with the love I have developed for myself since then. As a survivor of multiple acts of sexual abuse, I can only say it's an arduous and messy road to healing, but we are powerful and resilient as fuck, much more so than we give ourselves credit for.